South African Minister of State Security Dipuo Letsatsi-Duba makes it clear that while the Jewish community is under no particular threat, the department of state security takes seriously its mandate to protect the country’s citizens.

Lawyers are preparing criminal and civil charges following one of the darkest weeks of anti-Semitism in South Africa. There have been a slew of vile incidents that sent shock waves through the community.

The SA Friends of the Beit Halochem Zahal Disabled Veterans Organisation was established in Johannesburg in 1982, its primary goal being to help and support Zahal disabled veterans by raising funds to help them return and resume their normal lives as soon as possible.

Dr Ali Bacher, former South African cricket captain and administrator, was one of the five recipients of the 2018 Steve Tshwete Lifetime Achievement Awards at the SA Sport Awards held in Bloemfontein on Sunday night.

Devotion to the cause of the State of Israel flourishes in the most unlikely places, even in societies where the Jewish presence is small to non-existent. Such is the case in Mozambique, where the work of Beth-El Associacao Crista Amigos De Israel - Mozambican Christian Friends of Israel - testifies to how much can be achieved by those inspired by their Christian faith to promote the Israeli cause, despite adverse conditions.

JNF’s unique “Blue Boy Box” now lives at King David Linksfield Pre-Primary so that children of each generation learn the importance of tzedakah (charity or welfare). It is the responsibility of Jews all over the world to build Israel, develop it and nurture it as the home of the Jewish nation

“Knowledge is Light” was our school motto when I was a child in Durban. The importance of education was made clear to us from as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t taken for granted. A good education was a privilege.

Late on Tuesday, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect. While at the time of writing the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had still not confirmed the existence of such a truce, Israeli citizens living in the south of the country were told they could return home and to “normalcy”.

The Israeli gymnastics team was out in full force at 48th FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships that began at Aspire Dome in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday. There are five males and two females in the team headed by new Israeli sensation Artem Dolgopyat. The others are Alexander Shatilov, Ilan Korchak, Andrey Medvedev, and Michael Sorokine, while the women are Ofir Netzer and Meitar Lavy.

As I was heading home on Tuesday, I heard on ChaiFM that 460 rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel since late Sunday. That is an outrageous number. If every one of them hit inhabited areas, thousands of Israelis would have been killed.

“The president is not directly responsible for acts of domestic terrorism, but he should be more careful with his language.” That’s the way the Economist headlined its report on the horrific Pittsburgh killings just more than two weeks ago.

With Prince William’s historic visit to Israel this week, all eyes have been trained on the Jewish capital. It may have taken 70 years, but the first official visit by a member of the British Royal family began in Israel on Monday, when William, the Duke of Cambridge, arrived in Tel Aviv.

Some 5 600 emissaries (shluchim) from Chabad-Lubavitch from all over the world gathered at the Pier 8 warehouse in Brooklyn, New York this week for the opening of their four-day annual international conference and banquet, 75 years after the arrival of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Europe.

“The greatness of our nation is that our people are great. We are a nation of heroes, of people with good and decent moral fibre who will not tolerate our country being plundered!” So said Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein in Pretoria this morning.“This is a struggle for accountability and justice,” Goldstein told the crowd (which included prominent Jewish CEOs like Adrian Gore, Stephen Koseff and Michael Katz). “This struggle is about sovereignty. The power of the people always triumphs in the end.”

‘Truth’ belongs to those who shout loudest

Time will tell as to whether Britain’s Labour Party, following its unexpectedly heavy defeat in the May elections, has committed electoral suicide by choosing the dogmatic, old-school ultra-leftist Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader.

by
DAVID SAKS | Oct 14, 2015

Domestic economic issues aside, what has particularly provoked unease is Corbyn’s stance on foreign policy issues, which includes supporting Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, describing leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” and making a supportive TV appearance on an Iranian state propaganda channel.

The fact that he pointedly declined to sing the national anthem at a memorial service for British war dead did not fail to go unnoticed. The Tories are by and large quite pleased that their traditional rivals, in an apparent overreaction to their reverse at the polls, have opted for a leader whose views are so extreme as to make the party essentially unelectable so long as he is in charge.

One can only but hope that no radical shift in the country’s fortunes - another global economic meltdown for instance - will change that outlook.

So far as Israel is concerned, Corbyn is predictably implacably hostile, and an ardent proponent of the boycott strategy. When addressing a gathering of Labour Friends of Israel recently, he could not even bring himself to refer to Israel by name, a sure indication of his being unable to come to terms with its very existence.

As we have seen, those advocating the Jewish state’s destruction (when not simply resorting to the standard “Zionist entity” phrase) almost invariably precede any mention of it with such epithets as “illegitimate state of….”, “racist”, “colony of” or “apartheid”.

So great is their hatred for Israel that they cannot even bring themselves to say the word. It always bothers me when people like Corbyn are described as “harsh critics” of Israel, since their antipathy clearly goes much further than that.

Corbyn’s election has caused more disquiet within the British left than in conservative circles. Many Labour supporters are seeing it as another sharp lurch away from such traditional liberal-left values of secular democracy, gender and sexual equality and anti-racism on the part of the left-wing establishment.

The phenomenon is by no means limited to the UK. Throughout the democratic world, one will find voices being raised (to little effect, it would appear) against how the above values are being betrayed in what has in reality become an ideological war against the Western democracies.

Some have termed the alliance between radical Islam and the hard-core left as a modern-day “Hitler-Stalin Pact”. In historical terms, this is not accurate, however. The latter was a pragmatic arrangement between two dictatorships in which, inter alia, they agreed not to go to war with one another in the near future; it was not an ideological alliance.

By contrast, loony leftists and Jihadists seem to have found common cause in the realm of ideas, and are collaborating in that arena.

On the face of it, the hard-line left and Islamist right should be utterly opposed to one another. No-one would argue that among the core values that the broader left has in common are secularism (including the right to question and, if desired, mock other religions), gender equality, gay rights and in general a non-judgemental approach to how people conduct their sex lives. Also ostensibly of fundamental importance is an unequivocal rejection of racism, which surely extends to cultural or religious-based prejudice.

One does not have to be an analytical genius to see at once that the Islamist position on every one of these issues is diametrically opposite to what the left holds. This even extends to the left’s supposed opposition to racism and like forms of prejudice.

The overwhelming sense of betrayal that left-leaning Jews are feeling is in large part due to the failure of their ideological “family” to distance itself from the rabid anti-Semitism permeating every corner of the Islamist movement.

The same silence is evident regarding the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East (obviously such reticence has not applied with regard to the occasional vandalising of a church in Israel, the only Middle East country where Christianity is growing).

I have long cudgelled my brains over what the far left and Islamist right might have in common and come up with a few tentative conclusions. In summary, what ultimately unites the two camps would appear to be a resentment-driven victim mentality combined with a fanatical sense of self-righteousness that leaves little room for serious introspection.

The rage is in both cases outward-directed, against an evil “other” exclusively responsible for preventing the coming about of an envisaged global Utopia. In this paranoid, conspiracy theory-ridden world view, the strong and successful are as a matter of course held to be guilty while those who fail to compete with them are righteous victims in no way responsible for their plight.

This explains why the US and Israel are depicted as being the epitome of evil by both the hard left and the Islamists. As a naïve youth, I used to believe that hard facts and common sense would always prevail in the end. Now I know that “truth” belongs to those able to shout the loudest. However, that is not a reason for the rest of us not to keep fighting.

2 Comments

2
Samuel
15 Oct

How ironic and insidious too that Stalinism/Marxism,responsible for heinous crimes against humanity in the former USSR and beyond,Cuba etc.is now aligned with Islam,also responsible for untold violence and unspeakable atrocities and genocide against non-Muslims (Darfur ,S.Sudan) in their hatred of Judaism/Zionism .

1
Myron Robinson
21 Oct

Corbyn is anti-Semitic, anti Zionist & most definitely anti Israel. Hopefully the Jews in the UK will not cast their vote for labour whilst Corbyn is at the helm. Not to sing your national anthem, more so as leader of the opposition, says much for the calibre of Corbyn and more so his left wing views and those he supports. How stupid can the Labour Party be to have voted in such a self obsessed narcissist